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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25437892">Best in Season</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud'>PacificRimbaud</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Muggle, American AU, M/M, farmers market</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:20:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,294</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25437892</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There are rules, probably, about that kind of thing. No shirt, no shoes, no selling consumable products in a farmer’s market. His hair, presumably in obeyance of legally enforceable hygiene standards, is up, dark curls in a messy bun at the back of his head. He’s smiling with half his mouth, and there’s that—whatever the fuck that is.<br/>With his eyes.<br/>It’s a glint, there’s really no other word for it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Draco Malfoy/Scabior</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>53</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Best in Season</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/gifts">provocative_envy</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy birthday to Provocative Envy!<br/>Please accept this homage to your Drabior, written straight from the hip. Literally I wrote this: today, so. Managing expectations. You're grand and I'm so glad to know you.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You look <em>fine. </em> It’s a farmer’s market, not a trip to a trunk show at fucking Neiman Marcus with your mother. Let’s just go.”</p><p>Pansy, sitting at the front edge of the leather passenger seat of Draco’s car, flicks the tip of a fingernail along the edge of her bottom lip, sweeping away a stray fleck of red lip gloss—no, lipstick . . . lip <em> paint, </em>she’d said, witheringly, while he rolled the over-designed glass tube of it in his fingers just to have something to do.</p><p>She doesn’t even bother to side-eye him, just examines herself in the flip-down mirror looking for pores or an eyelash bent at the wrong angle or whatever the fuck it is she sees when she looks at herself.</p><p>Draco jostles his knee so hard it bangs against the steering wheel.</p><p>She turns. Glares. Withers, which is kind of a major fucking turn on, if he’s being honest, but today’s not about honesty, it’s about . . .</p><p>It’s about <em> bees. </em></p><p>When they finally get out of the car, Pansy’s half a step behind, the discreet nose job she had two summers ago literally turned up, while Draco skirts a pool of chalk-pink ice cream setting up in the sun on the paint-stained, pressure-washed asphalt floor of the market.</p><p>It’s crowded on a Saturday, a tinge of biorhythmically grown toxin-free homeopathic sunscreen underneath the pervasive smells of raw salmon and dried lavender and just straight up fucking <em> dirt,</em> babywearing dads in cargo shorts pushing two-tiered strollers shoulder to shoulder with gray-haired women in wide-brimmed sun hats, elbows weighted with fairly-traded Ghanaian woven grass baskets, the green tops of carrots spilling out over their rims in pious agricultural abundance.</p><p>Draco passes stalls with baskets of beets and fennel and dahlias, stalls with racks of postcards made from watercolor paintings of orca whales, stalls full of cross-body bags repurposed from felted wool sweaters, and it’s all completely beside the point, totally irrelevant to the reason that he swallows.</p><p>Girds.</p><p>Shores up, battens down, mans the—there are <em> metaphors, </em> is the point. Military metaphors, and sailing metaphors, metaphors about military sailing, about being defended, being fucking <em> prepared. </em></p><p>Which is the whole entire purpose of Pansy, who, as much as she’s a massive pain in the ass, also knows exactly where the shots are coming from, where they’re going next, and how to turn a vessel fast on the open sea, and without whom there’s no clear, reliable way to be ready for—</p><p>“Is he not wearing a shirt?”</p><p>Pansy—in Fendi sunglasses and a cross-back sundress that doesn't quite hit the midpoint of her thighs, slicked from the freakishly tidy part in her gloss-black French bob to the tips of her red-lacquered toes with the Korean sunscreen she has shipped illegally from Canada and sells on a black market basis to their friends—stops walking.    </p><p>Draco looks at her sidelong. “Of course he’s wearing a fucking shirt. You just can’t see it under his apron.”</p><p>“I’m getting a toddy.” She turns on the heel of one of her Greek sandals and walks off in the direction of the coffee shop on the other side of the street, taking with her the whole of the strategy Draco had meticulously laid out in a series of indirect conversations where he had implied, suggested, <em> hinted </em> at needing some fucking <em> help </em> manning the fucking <em> ship. </em></p><p>“Hey.”</p><p>Draco, abandoned at sea, his port laid bare, turns.</p><p>He sucks in a breath.</p><p>Considers the enemy.</p><p>Who may actually not be wearing a shirt.</p><p>There are rules, probably, about that kind of thing. No shirt, no shoes, no selling consumable products in a farmer’s market. His hair, presumably in obeyance of legally enforceable hygiene standards, is up, dark curls in a messy bun at the back of his head. He’s smiling with half his mouth, and there’s that—whatever the fuck that is.</p><p>With his eyes.</p><p>It’s a <em> glint, </em> there’s really no other word for it, which fucking sucks, because Draco can’t think of it without being reminded of that shitty ubiquitous Victorian poem about Santa being made out of Jell-O, but there’s nothing merry here. No one is twinkling. No one is going to <em> wink. </em></p><p>But then Draco watches in frozen fascination as Scabior–<em>Scabior </em> is that, like, his first name? Last? It has to be a nickname, but <em> why?</em>–tamps gunpowder down the barrel of his long nine, drops a cannon ball inside, takes aim directly at Draco—armored in nothing more than an untucked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the arm of his Ray Bans hooked over the open neck, and a pair of Nantucket red chino shorts, a sitting Ivy League duck in the middle of the crowded walkway of a Left Coast glorified vegetable stand—and winks.</p><p>The shot screams across the six feet of open ocean between them, and Draco takes the hit straight to the mast.</p><p>There’s a mom and a kid, both sucking honey off of splintery, flat toothpicks.</p><p>“This is one of my best guys. He’s made from lavender. I really, really like this guy, ‘cause he wants to help you stay healthy. Keep away the bugs in the cold and flu season. And these girls—” Scabior lays a tattooed hand along the wooden edge of a glass-sided frame filled with honeycomb and, more urgently, more <em> viscerally, </em> with bees, sitting on his table “—they love lavender, so when they get it, they go nuts. They’re always out there working hard, cooperating, keeping the world of nature going. That’s what they <em> do, </em> but when I get to take them to the lavender farm where they don’t spray the harmful shit—” Scabior glances down at the mother, then further down at the kid “—excuse my French. But where it’s organic. Clean.” He splays his hands out to the sides. “They’re into it. They’re hardworking, happy girls.”</p><p>He looks back up at Draco.</p><p>He <em> glints. </em></p><p>Draco feels the second shot as it whistles over his deck.</p><p>After the mom buys a $30 jar of lavender-forage honey and Scabior gives her kid a sealed plastic tube of the same stuff, Draco, hands in the pockets of his chinos, advances.</p><p>Scabior stashes the money in a rattling greige lock box, and from the side, Draco sees that he’s wearing a shredded cut sleeve t-shirt under his apron. The arm holes aren’t holes so much as they’re trenches, long and wide, the wash-frayed, sun-bleached fabric of a formerly black t-shirt hanging from his shoulders in thin strips, the openings at the sides leaving visible for tactical study the taut, tattooed, sun-browned skin stretched over the ladder of Scabior’s ribs and one . . . two . . . three . . . phalanxes of abdominal muscle.</p><p>There’s a glint there, too, and Draco discovers—again, because he already knows this, but it’s a weapon whose chief advantage is an inexhaustible element of surprise—the surgical steel hoops in Scabior’s nipples, dark and small and signalling the starting edge of the sparse hair that sprouts noncommittally over Scabior’s chest.</p><p>“Do you want a taste?”</p><p>Scabior holds out a toothpick.</p><p>Draco stands petrified as a bead of honey rolls down its long edge and onto the dirt-crusted callouses cross hatched over the tips of Scabior’s fingers.</p><p>He watches himself in detached awe as he reaches, grasps, his own fingertips nearly white, nails manicured, hands warmed and oiled and massaged by a briskly professional cosmetologist every two weeks before his cuticles are trimmed and every gross, twiggy edge filed away.</p><p>The honey drips between them—warm, fluid, thick.</p><p>Draco pulls away first, takes the toothpick with him, props it between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and sucks.</p><p>Scabior—merry but mocking, mirthful but dirty about it, winking in spirit if not in the flesh—opens his mouth.</p><p>Licks the bead of honey from the tip of his thumb.</p><p>Pushes the tip past his lips.</p><p>Sucks.</p><p>Swallows.</p><p>The honey in Draco’s mouth is hot. Not temperature hot, like the wasp-crowded pools of spilled Coke evaporating on the black August asphalt, but <em> chemically </em> hot.</p><p>Hot like off-brand gas station chewy cinnamon candy.</p><p>Hotter than that, a little.</p><p>Hot like peppers.</p><p>Draco is very, slightly, non-anaphylactically allergic to peppers.</p><p>He is more than slightly, unambiguously, anaphylactically allergic to bees.</p><p>“This is my spicy boy.” Scabior crosses his arms over his chest, and Draco can’t help the way his eyes flicker over the tattoos there, all black and apparently random and some of them really fucking dumb, like the one of the Kool-Aid man holding up a pair of Glocks that are shooting—yeah, he was right last week, they're absolutely shooting bees—but they flex with every one of Scabior’s movements, nothing but skin and muscle and hard-edged bone, and Draco wonders, obliquely, where he’s <em> not </em> tattooed as much as he wants to know precisely, thoroughly, <em> exhaustively, </em> where he is.</p><p>Draco pulls the toothpick out of his mouth. Throws it into the rolled-top paper bag on the wooden counter.</p><p>Swallows.</p><p>Coughs.</p><p>It’s not <em> anaphylaxis. </em></p><p>It’s more like an <em> itch. </em></p><p>Draco leans against the knotted wooden post framing the stall, casually, and crosses his arms in a way that makes his shirt ride up, <em> casually, </em> and he doesn’t miss the way Scabior looks—stares, Draco thinks—at the flash of hipbone there, and who’s the one taking aim now?</p><p>“Thought of a name yet?” Draco drawls, gesturing at the blank space over the stall where Scabior’s business is failing to advertise itself.</p><p>He doesn’t mean to sound that bored, that <em> expensive, </em> but in the absence of Pansy the fucking deserter and her iced fucking cold brewed coffee, it’s what he has in his arsenal, and so he wields it like a close-combat weapon, a cutlass he wants this tattooed probably ex-con beekeeper with the stray black curl falling over one eye and the half-grown facial hair to see.</p><p>Quiver in your scuffed black military surplus combat boots, Draco thinks.</p><p>Just a bit.</p><p>
  <em> Please. </em>
</p><p>“He sounds like a fucking pirate,” Pansy had interrupted—bored, genuinely, expensive, always, sitting ghost-pale in the shade of a massive umbrella next to Draco’s pool while he paddled himself around in a circle on a float, exasperated, yammering, begrudgingly turned on, confessionally stoned.</p><p>“Did you make it through the jar you bought last week?” Scabior asks, skirting Draco’s question about the conspicuous lack of a name for his maybe, probably, almost certainly illegal honey business, and Draco is yanked unceremoniously back to the reality of the commercial enterprise, such as it is, in front of him.</p><p>Rows of honey in irregular jars, labeled with nothing but white adhesive rectangles with prices handwritten in Scabior’s scrawl, lined up next to bottles filled with angry red liquids, all hot sauces, labeled in wax pencil with “Mild,” "Medium," "Hot," and “Nope,” and in a third group, small jars of medicinal honey with sprigs and leaves and blossoms of herbs suspended inside, with no labels at all.</p><p>To the side, over the surface of the comb in its glass-walled case, bees crawl around over their structurally optimal hexagonal pods, shuffling, snuffling, doing whatever the fuck it is that bees do.</p><p>“It was for my mother,” Draco lies, and for a moment the thought of Narcissa Malfoy holding an unlabeled jar of honey in their kitchen gingerly, by its lid, as though she’d found a piece of unexploded ordnance lurking in the pantry, makes him bite back a smirk.</p><p>"Your mom, huh?" In unison, as companions, as <em>conspirators,</em> Scabior's eyebrow and the corner of his mouth twitch upward, like Draco or the idea of Draco's mom or both is amusing to him, are a joke, and Draco bristles with artillery.</p><p>Where the fuck is Pansy when you need her?</p><p>"Did you want some?" Scabior asks, and he unfurls, lays his hands on the counter behind him, stretches up and twists his head to the side, loosening some point of tightness in his neck. "For yourself?"</p><p>Draco looks at the field of weird containers. He's heard the spiel. There's clover and lavender and wildflower honey, apple blossom and alfalfa, honey in shades from straw-pale to brown as tea.</p><p>"Has anyone ever taught you how to taste?" Scabior asks.</p><p>"What?"</p><p>Draco pulls back hard on the reins of his confusion and schools his features as Scabior plucks what looks like a former jam jar from the ranks.</p><p>"You," Scabior twists the lid open, "look like someone who appreciates it when things are in order, like they're supposed to be. So I'm thinking, you'll like something with a predictable source of forage. Where you know what you'll be getting. Probably something nice, and pretty sweet. You're going to want the sort of boy who behaves himself. You can bring him home to your mom."</p><p>Draco stands up taller, and jams his hands down into his pockets again. Shakes his head in the negative.</p><p>"No," he says, and watches Scabior's hand pause on the lid of the jar. "I mean, I'd be interested in trying something that's not . . . that."</p><p>Scabior nods. Frowns and raises his eyebrows in that way that means unexpected approval.</p><p>Surprise respect.</p><p>Dawning interest.</p><p>"Alright."</p><p>He sets down the jar of pale amber honey and picks up a smaller one filled with thick, cloudy stuff as dark as coffee.</p><p>"This boy is a bit different. He's not for your tea, or your little cookies—"</p><p>Draco scoffs.</p><p>Scabior holds out a defensive hand. "Just hear me out."</p><p>He opens the jar, dips one of his rough toothpicks inside, and holds it out to Draco.</p><p>Draco takes it, moves to slip it into his mouth.</p><p>"Wait." Scabior gestures for him to stop. Digs a second toothpick into the jar. Holds on to it for himself.</p><p>"So you've tasted before?" he asks again. "Like wine, or coffee? Chocolate?"</p><p>Draco rolls his eyes. "Of course."</p><p>"This is just like that. Aroma is like eighty, ninety percent of taste. You want to get in there, and—"</p><p>Scabior smells his toothpick.</p><p>Draco, toothpick pinched between his index finger and thumb, follows suit, and—</p><p>It smells smokey, salty, and heavy, dark over sweet.</p><p>"Mmm hmm." Scabior's head bobs in affirmation. "This boy, he's been through some stuff. Go ahead and give him a try."</p><p>Draco lays the toothpick against his tongue while Scabior watches.</p><p>"He's blackberry, which the girls really dig. They get things going, get their flow on hard when the blackberry hits."</p><p>He puts the toothpick in his mouth, and slowly, thoughtfully, draws it out.</p><p>"And blackberry wants to be smooth. He wants to be sweet. And he <em> is, </em> really, but we take him, and we smoke him for a long time. Apple wood, so we're keeping that little bright, sharp edge that we like, that bit of <em> play </em> that keeps us interested, and we're giving him some experience. He's going to sit and mellow with all of that, then he's going to hit you with that really dark smokiness."</p><p>Draco rolls the toothpick over in his mouth.</p><p>Scabior leans back again, hands on the counter behind him.</p><p>"He's still sweet. And you can use him on, like, ice cream. He's very, very nice that way."</p><p>Draco imagines smoke and vanilla, sharp and a little acrid, sugar cooIed and creamed and burned all at once.</p><p>"You can drizzle him over a ripe pear, or you can get him salty. Savory. But he's also good on his own, when you want that little taste of something different. But you don't want it all the time."</p><p>Draco pulls the toothpick out of his mouth. "I don't?"</p><p>Scabior shakes his head. "No. This is not who you bring home to your mom. This," Scabior taps the lid of the pale, predictable honey, "is the boy mom wants you to pick up."</p><p>Draco draws the toothpick from his mouth and drops it in the paper bag.</p><p>Nods at the smoked honey.</p><p>"I'll take that one."</p><p>Scabior takes Draco's money and bags the jar.</p><p>"If you like this," he indicates the bag he's holding out, "there's a dinner. Farm to table kind of thing. There's an orchard, one I take the girls to. I know the chef from back in the day. He just does events, personal chef stuff now. Kind of different."</p><p>Draco's fingertips don't need to brush over Scabior's tattooed knuckles while he takes the bag, but they do.</p><p>"Yeah?" He holds the bag awkwardly at his side. Is he asking about, like, a <em> date, </em> he wonders, or—</p><p>Scabior digs into a canvas backpack sitting behind a stack of milk crates.</p><p>He holds out a card, and Draco takes it.</p><p>It's cheap, rough-textured ecru card stock that reads "Antonin Dolohov, Chef" with a phone number underneath.</p><p>That's it.</p><p>"It's like a rotating thing. Pop up, secret cafe, whatever you want to call it. It's exclusive, but call him and tell him Scabior sent you his way."</p><p>"Are you going?" Draco asks, pocketing the card.</p><p>Scabior pointlessly twists a jar of honey around in a full circle in the middle of his display.</p><p>"I help cook. Sous chef. Help with the wine pairings. Dessert. All that stuff."</p><p>"Ah."</p><p>Draco swallows again.</p><p>Does his best to turn the prow of his ship around. To look like he's headed . . . somewhere he needs to go.</p><p>"Thanks," he says, and he hoists the bag in his hand.</p><p>Scabior glints.</p><p>"Say hi to your mom."</p><p> </p><p>Draco sits in his car, the back of his head pressed hard into the seat, sun burning red through his closed eyelids.</p><p>"Pop the trunk."</p><p>He turns around. "Where the fuck have you been?"</p><p>Pansy's standing behind the car, next to a pair of trees that are as tall as she is and a man who’s a head and a half taller, rattling the ice in her half-empty plastic cup.</p><p>“Just pop the trunk, Draco.”</p><p>The man—</p><p>“Neville,” Pansy hisses back at Draco as she climbs into the passenger seat a moment later.</p><p>“Who the fuck is named <em>Neville</em>?”</p><p>“<em>He </em> is.”</p><p>—loads the trees into the trunk of Draco’s Porsche, then leans awkwardly against Draco’s rear bumper, all gangles and flushed cheeks and blindsided, earnest, unconcealed desire, while Pansy twirls her necklace around her index finger and does that thing where she folds one knee across the other that makes men think about having sex with her.</p><p> </p><p>Driving home on side streets so the trees aren’t stripped of their leaves, or don’t flip out of Draco’s trunk into the middle of I-5, Pansy looks at the business card for Antonin Dolohov, Chef.</p><p>“So the guy that sells illegal honey has a friend who runs a dubious farm to table dinner. In an orchard, somewhere.”</p><p>“You owe me.”</p><p>“I don’t owe you a thing.” Pansy pulls the straw between her deep red lips and sips at the dregs of her iced toddy.</p><p>Draco, foot on the brake at a stoplight, points over his shoulder at the pair of fruit trees hanging out of the back of his sports car.</p><p>“Your plum trees—”</p><p>“Apricot. These varieties do really well in our growing zone.”</p><p>Draco shifts the car hard into first as the light changes. “You’re going to go home, put on a pair of dungarees—”</p><p>“<em>Dungarees." </em>Pansy nods. "Nice.”</p><p>“—and dig a pair of holes in your yard?”</p><p>Pansy leans her head back, tilts her face up to the sun and smiles.</p><p>It's something that Draco doesn't recognize, small and soft and secret in a way that makes him feel like he's barging in on something.</p><p>“Neville’s going to come over and take care of the holes.”</p><p>“Of course he is. You left me wide open, Pans.” Draco shifts into second on a residential street. “Wide <em> fucking </em> open.”</p><p>“I’ll bet you were.”</p><p>“I am <em> owed, </em> is what I’m—”</p><p>“Fine. Go through In-N-Out. I’m fucking starving.”</p>
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